Celsius

P2P Decentralized Lending & Borrowing Platform

We believe the future of lending and borrowing will manifest itself in a P2P decentralized environment on the blockchain. In our view, traditional financial institutions should no longer control the flow of credit to people across the world. We want to use a consensus-based, Proof-of-Stake approach to allow the Celsius community to borrow, lend and vouch for each other, creating a truly win-win-win self-governed solution for people involved in every step of the credit ecosystem.
Members will be able to borrow USD against their crypto holdings in their wallet which will be used as collateral. Our goal is to allow anyone who’s in need of cash to easily borrow from the Celsius platform without having to sell their crypto holdings.
In the future, through the Celsius Network, cryptocurrencies deposited by members into their Celsius Wallet will be available on the network for immediate borrowing and shorting.

About Celsius

We’ve built companies from the ground up, served hundreds of millions of users and completed multiple exits for billions of dollars (including an IPO).

This isn’t our first rodeo. Our team of experienced entrepreneurs knows how to take a concept from ideation to full execution on a global scale.

Our founder, Alex Mashinsky, has filed over 30 patents including the original patent on VoIP technology. He previously founded several multi-billion dollar businesses including Arbinet (IPO 2004), TransitWireless and GroundLink. A cryptoholder since 2013, Alex serves as an advisor and investor to several Blockchain companies including Sirin Labs, MicroMoney and Ties Network.

Ratings

To me "the future of consumer credit" is more like Bloom than Celsius. Indeed when you go to the Celsius website it seems the product is more being marketed as a way to earn interest on your wallet by loaning funds to investors on the fly, especially to back shorting.

I can't honestly believe that regular consumers are going to want to hold cryptocurrency for 7% interest when they also have to deal with wild fluctuations against fiat. There's no glory in buying 1.0 BTC today and having 1.07 BTC in a year if BTC price crashes to 1/10 of what it was in that time. IMO this is clearly targeted at more advanced users who would have been HODLing that BTC, ETC or whatever all that time.

Also in case you think that borrowers can get a great deal note that it seems as well as the 7% interest they also need to pay an additional 5% operations cost to Celcius plus 5% insurance against bad debt (which I assume is less for lower risk borrowers). While pay-day loans are definitely a lot more expensive than this unless Celsius is planning to loan fiat tethered coins I can't see this being suitable for any regular consumers.

I don't like that the whitepaper needs me to give up an email address to get a link. That's the first time I've ever had to do that.

So far there is no evidence of actual product. They only list two true developers on the team, the rest are biz and marketing types. The seem to have some strong links back to the FinTech world - including Alex Mashinsky who has real experience building companies and raising money. You'll need that for sure with a product like this because it isn't going to bootstrap on its own IMO.

I have been lucky enough to meet the team here in NYC many times where they are based. The market they are tackling (consumer credit) is in desperate need of an overhaul and I believe they have all of the right pieces to make it happen.

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